In the November 2015 issue of Christianity Today, the banner publication of Evangelical Protestantism, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner co-authored an article titled “The Power of our Weakness”. Gerson is a regular columnist in The Washington Post, and Wehner is on the staff of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think-tank in Washington. The authors basically agree that “we” lost: The “we” means conservative Christians, which could include both Evangelicals and Catholics, but the main concern here is the target audience of Evangelicals. This is not my faith community, but the question asked here must interest anyone concerned about culture, religion and politics in America.
The assumption of the article is that the Supreme Court decision in favor of same-sex marriage is a cultural landmark, placing gay rights within the moral authority of the civil rights movement—as it were, Martin Luther King blessing the rainbow banner. The decision, the authors say, is “like a boulder thrown into a pond which will have consequences for years”. A spokesman for the conservative Family Research Council calls it “the downfall of America”. Gerson and Wehner agree but they also insist that it is not simply a climax of the gay movement but has deeper roots in the (then predominantly heterosexual) cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. After all, there were all those feminists who, burning their bras while men refusing military service burned their draft cards, announced that “girls say yes to boys who say no”—even if they had to move to Canada to redeem their pledge. These now-aging women (they didn’t mind being called “girls” then) must resent that they don’t get a letter in the so-called “LGBT” community (unless perhaps they can pass as lesbians).
The authors suggest that Evangelicals now face two options. The “Benedict option” is named after Benedict of Nursia (480-547 CE), the founder of the Benedictine Order, who after the onset of an era of civilizational darkness created a monastic subculture in which the Christian virtues could be cultivated and the treasures of the vanishing civilization preserved to survive the rule of the barbarians. Gerson and Wehner don’t much like this option, not only because (as far as I know) they don’t propose to live by the Rule of St. Benedict, but because the option exaggerates the extent of the barbarian victory. After all, they correctly point out that some things have been getting better since the 1960s. For example, the mindless admiration on the American left for murderous Marxist regimes (the bloodier the better) has much diminished. Even Bernie Sanders, who proudly proclaims that he is a socialist, adds that he is a democratic socialist.
The authors of the Christianity Today article prefer what they call “the Wilberforce option”. William Wilberforce (1759-1883), was an Evangelical leader of the anti-slavery movement in Britain at a time when that barbaric institution was broadly accepted. Wilberforce died a few days after his movement achieved victory with the passage by Parliament of the Slavery Abolition Act. After that the Royal Navy actively suppressed the slave trade on the high seas. The movement became very active in the United States, served to legitimate the Union side in the Civil War, and about two decades later President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration. The option for American Evangelicals today means a focus for action on issues where they can still have an impact, as they have already had on development aid, the campaigns against HIV-AIDS and sex-trafficking, and with the notable work of Chuck Colson on prison reform. This also calls for a “rebalancing” of the disproportionate emphasis on sexual morality. (This is also something that Pope Francis has been urging. Could it be that Evangelicals might also take their cue from Rome on the issue of the death penalty?) Gerson and Wehner define this approach as not pursuing power, but rather “making an offer of grace”. They cite the remarkable event that followed the massacre at Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina by the white racist Dylan Roof—when relatives of the victims confronted the murderer in open court offering him their forgiveness. A few days later the Governor Nikki Haley (herself an Evangelical) ordered Confederate flags to be removed from state properties.
Despite the aforementioned setbacks, American Evangelicals are far from marginalized in America. They have gone through several significant transitions in their history. As far as I know, the term “Evangelical” originated in England. (I will resist the temptation to enlarge here on a pet peeve of mine—the inanity of spelling the term in lower case while Protestant and Christian are spelled in caps. I imagine that this decision was made by someone who never understood the difference between common and particular nouns in elementary school, and that his decision was subsequently immortalized by computer spellcheck programs). The term was applied originally as now both to certain Nonconformist free churches and to a wing within the Church of England (affectionately called “low and lazy”, against the other wings dubbed “broad and hazy” and “high and crazy”).
In the British colonies of North America and in the United States that emerged from these, as in the old country, Evangelicals were located both within broader denominations and in those directly identified with Evangelical Protestantism. A pivotal event was the First Great Awakening led by Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), a preacher coming out of the originally Calvinist theology of Puritan Massachusetts. He combined a strange paradox within himself: on the one hand he led a movement passionately committed to converting all to faith in Christ; on the other hand he adhered theologically to the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, according to which God has decided from all eternity who goes to heaven and who to hell. As a theologian with this belief, Edwards preached his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” which glorifies God’s justice in carrying out sentence of damnation on those predestined to this fate. (I would classify this sermon as one of the ugliest in Christian history, number two after another of Edwards’ sermons, which describes the elect in heaven looking down on their loved ones in hell, and also praising God’s justice.)
Edwards was reputedly a very learned man, but even such individuals have been known to hold logically incompatible views. Be this as it may, an Evangelical undercurrent was very influential in Protestant revivalism all the way into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While this Protestantism was very variegated because of the confluence of religious pluralism and religious freedom, those who belonged to this broad community could smugly believe that their Judeo-Christian values did indeed represent a moral majority. In all likelihood Evangelicals were in the majority of Protestants across the denominational spectrum. They greatly influenced politics, their climactic achievement being the federal establishment of Prohibition (which paradoxically vastly increased the prevalence of organized crime in America).
A further pivotal event, which shattered the assumed hegemony of a basically Evangelical value system, was the so-called “monkey trial” of 1925. The state of Tennessee tried John Scopes, a schoolteacher, for violating a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow, the renowned trial lawyer and representative of Enlightened secularism, came to the trial as Scopes’ attorney. William Jennings Bryan, an Evangelical icon, came to the sweltering courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, acting as prosecutor for the state. To put it simply, Darrow made mincemeat of Bryan. There was no doubt about Scopes’ technical violation of the law, so Darrow wasted no time arguing that his client was not guilty. Instead he made a massive assault on the Bible’s veracity against the claims of evolutionary biology. He caught Bryan in endless contradictions and inconsistencies in the Biblical account of creation. Bryan was reduced to incoherence, finally launched into a sermon ignoring Darrow’s arguments by proclaiming, book by book, the authority of the Bible. Inevitably, Scopes was convicted; he was fined one dollar. Bryan, exhausted and thoroughly humiliated, died at a supper in Dayton a few days after the trial.
Another one of his misfortunes was that the gifted journalist H.L. Mencken, reporting for The Baltimore Sun, wrote a widely reprinted and cleverly devastating account of the trial, making cruel fun of Bryan’s beliefs and the assembled provincial yokels. Arguably this episode so shocked the Evangelical community, motivating it into withdrawing into its shell (a kind of “Benedict option”). Its anti-intellectualism was opposition to the secularism of Darrow and Mencken. (The latter, I might hypothetize, marked the beginning of the Europeanization of the American intelligentsia. Obviously I cannot develop this hypothesis here.)
There is a curious postscript to this event, indicating that inconsistency is a quality of which both Biblical and secularist fundamentalists are equally capable. Some years after Dayton, Darrow served as defense attorney for two young men in Chicago who were convinced by reading Nietzsche that they were supermen, beyond good and evil, and to prove this to themselves gratuitously murdered another young man. (Oddly, Mencken was also a great admirer of Nietzsche and wrote a rather puerile interpretation of him.) Darrow made a very long speech to the jury, in which he lectured that all human actions are totally determined biologically and socially, and that therefore no one can be held responsible, and therefore the two defendants should be acquitted. They were convicted after all, but whether because of Darrow’s eloquence or for other reasons, they were spared the death penalty. (Come to think of it, did Darrow execute Bryan in Dayton? And could it be that, at the Chicago trial, Darrow was philosophically inconsistent but morally correct? Be careful before you answer these questions too quickly!)
Evangelicals remained stuck in their anti-intellectual subculture until the late 1970s, when they got a second wind and made a number of efforts to regain political and cultural influence. In 1994 the historian Mark Noll, one of their own, castigated them for their anti-intellectualism in his influential book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. By the time Noll wrote this book, the situation was changing. Perhaps partly because of disappointment with the presidency of Jimmy Carter (another one of their own, but who disappointed them), Evangelicals became an important constituency of the Republican party. They still are. I think a certain soberness has now set in. Because of their social mobility and resultant higher education, Evangelicals have now developed their own intelligentsia, newly self-confident, with their own network of colleges and centers. They generally supported George W. Bush, but were disappointed by the spectacular failure of his wars in the Middle East. Barack Obama has had little appeal to them (if he believes in anything at all, it appears to be the secularism of Harvard Yard), but his foreign policy has been a big failure as well. Willy-nilly the United States had become the global sheriff: With Bush the sheriff became reckless; with Obama he quit. It is possible that Gerson and Wehner have correctly discerned the outline of a new, much more reflective, Evangelical approach to politics and culture.
Who lost, who won the American culture war? Arguably, the tyranny-admiring Marxists lost, the amorous gays won. Not such a bad outcome, I should think.